He was surprised at how late it seemed. It was only a little before seven, but they had gone into the theater in the afternoon and were coming out into gathering twilight.
“Do you want to eat first?” Alan asked.
Diane shook her head.
She moved a little apart from him on the sidewalk as they turned the corner and went toward the bookshop. Alan, miserable, still frightened, wondered to himself just what the bastard had shown Diane — and what dark things he had promised her.
8
In the cemetery Michael Estes was no longer frightened of nothing.
Now he was frightened of something.
He was afraid his grandmother was insane.
She stood patiently, back stooped, head thrust forward, in a listening attitude at the foot of the grave, as she had stood for more than an hour. The sun was already behind the trees, and the sky in the west was glowing pink and gold. Still Ludie stood, immovable as the pillar of salt in the Bible, patient as the stones of the cemetery. The sunken grave before her filled with shadows. Evening wind rattled dead flowers. A chimney-swift flying overhead twittered. A car passed the church.
“Granny-Ma — ”
Ludie, swaying back and forth, turned her face toward him, her eyes closed. “I be wrong,” she said. “I thinkin’ it Jim Bascom comin’ back to trouble us and all. I ashamed. It ain’t him atall. It somethin’ got in him.”
“Let’s go home, Granny-Ma.”
The old woman nodded. “We go on home. He wonder what his wife doin’, where she go after he die. She miss him so bad. She must be old now, like me. She done gone away from this town, off somewheres. Only her second eldest daughter stay behind, and she dead now her own self, and her daughter, too.”
Michael took his grandmother’s arm and helped her pick her way back among the grave markers. Her step suddenly hitched, and he held tighter to keep her from stumbling. “Just a minute,” Ludie said. She stooped and fumbled with her skirts. After a second, Michael saw that she was entangled in a briar, a long, viny green briar with sharp brown-tipped stickers. He bent, grasped the stem between forefinger and thumb, and pulled. “Not so hard,” she said. “It let go if you pull the cloth the right way. Here.” Her old fingers deftly released the hem of her calico skirt from the briar’s thorns.
“It gonna be dark,” Michael said.
“It get dark every night.” Ludie sighed, long and deeply. “Lord forgive me, I wrong about Jim Bascom. Here I be thinkin’ it must be his spirit so restless, but that only part of it.” They got to the corner of the church, stepped out of the graveyard. “And he burnt the stable, too.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he done what the white folks say, he burnt the stable. ’Cause old Simmons wouldn’t give him his fair pay. Jim Bascom shouldn’t have burnt the stables, all them mules and horses dyin’ so hard. But a mule or a horse still ain’t a man, is it?”
“Granny-Ma, get in the car.” Michael opened the door and pulled his grandmother toward the vehicle.
She grunted as she ducked her head down and climbed into the front seat, making the springs creak. “Mule a mule, horse a horse, neither of them a man. But them white folks, they kill him all the same. Lord, they lift him in the air and fling him into the fire.” Michael slammed the door, went around to the driver’s side. “All for burnin’ wood and hay and killin’ mules and horses,” his grandmother said. “It ain’t right.”
Michael got behind the wheel and started the car. “Granny-Ma, you need to rest.”
“Evil spirit here, though. It in Gaither right now. It go to work on the meanness that already here,” she said. “It told him to burn that barn all them years ago. But it didn’t get him, it wasn’t strong enough. But now it come back. And they some in town, Lord, that has the true evil in them. It come back to town now, it wake that evil up, and it walk round just like a man. They some in town, Lord, that hang him and put him in the fire all them years back.”
The car spun gravel as it lurched onto the highway and turned back toward town. “You got to rest,” Michael said.
“His poor wife. His poor daughters. I done lost sight of them poor daughters. Mollie favor her, I think.”
“Who?”
“Jim's poor wife. Didn’t I say? Didn’t I tell you about Mollie? Mollie, she Jim Bascom’s grand-baby.”
9
“So. Tonight I recognized the one I first sensed.”
Andy, placing the film reels in their tins, looked at Mr. Badon. “Can it be tonight?” he asked. The final show was over, and he was ready to leave.
Badon shook his head. “I am stronger than I was, but not yet. There are things to be arranged. I think we must be respectable businessmen for a short while yet.”
Andy straightened, ran a hand through his red hair, raising it up in a ruff. “You told me I could do her.”
“In good time, Andy, in good time. You will be the perfect husband and father to your family, do you understand? You will not touch your wife or your children.”
“Except when you get into my head and want to fuck my wife!”
“Crude, Andy,” murmured Badon. He lifted a long finger. “It has been long since I sampled human lust. For my kind it is strong wine; I hope you will forgive my indulgence. But you shall have reward enough, in time; and I shall draw life and strength from your deed when you do it. It is to my interest, too, remember. But we are at a delicate balance just now. I moved perhaps a bit too rapidly at first, betrayed by my own great need. How fortunate we are that we now know our enemies. And how fortunate we are that no one will listen to them or believe their preposterous tales of ghouls and ghosts, eh? I think we shall go slowly. Next month is October, Andy. A splendid time of year, don’t you think?”
Andy grunted and clattered the cans into their racks.
“The end of the month, I think. Halloween. The Eve of All Hallows’ Day. That would be a fitting time to possess the town, do you think?”
“It’s a whole month off.”
“Oh, but I did not mean that you would have to be idle. No, there is much to do, Andy, much to do before then. We have a whole little army to recruit, and I must grow stronger, stronger, before I can be sure they move to my will always. We will travel slowly, but all the same we will go forward. And you will have treats, Andy. I think you will enjoy them.”
“Can I go now?”
“If you wish. I think I shall go as well.”
Andy stared at him. “You never left the theater before,” he said. “You slept here always before.”
“Did I?”
“Well, I thought you did, anyhow. Why should you go someplace else tonight?”
Badon smiled. “Tonight there is no midnight show, I think. I have given many of them already, and they tire me so. Did you know that I gave two more tonight, private midnight shows in the afternoon, to two special customers, while the other hogs around them saw the shadows of an ordinary film?” The smile became a wolfish grin. “I think perhaps when I am stronger, it would be interesting to give a Saturday-matinee midnight show. Yes, three hundred children all seeing it at once. I can picture them going home, the things they would do.” He shrugged. “However. There are already men and women in town who have seen my special shows, and when I wish them to act on them, they will. For tonight, I no longer feel comfortable in the theater. I shall take my repose elsewhere, I think.”
“It has to be soon,” Andy said. “That black-haired bitch.”
“Soon, Andy,” Badon said, his voice silk and shadows. “Very, very soon. Yes. Very soon now indeed.”
Eleven
1
Diane England was terribly abstracted all the next week. Miss Ulrich noticed it, the other students noticed it, and of course Alan noticed it.
She wasn’t hysterical; she wasn’t even very different. Still, there was something about the way she went through the motions of attending school that seemed mechanical, without thought. Alan pleaded with her several times to tell him what ha
d happened, what she had seen at the movie, only to be rewarded with a vacant stare from her, a face dead to emotion, as if he were a minor annoyance, or perhaps even less, something hardly worth notice, let alone anger.
Alan, after a long night without sleep, had met with Miss Lewis and Mr. Tate in the school on Sunday afternoon. Miss Lewis read aloud to them the sections of folklore she had marked, sections describing devil-men and dream demons, beings that assumed human form to torment men and women, the basis (according to one book) for widespread vampire and werewolf legends.
It was too much like a lesson in school, and Alan lost track of what she was saying. The chair he was in seemed springy to him, though it wasn’t, and the room was close and hot. He kept losing the buzz of Miss Lewis’s voice, kept seeing in his mind her standing naked by a window and his father behind her, caressing her. When at last she stopped talking, Mr. Tate, looking sidelong at the boy, had asked, “Somethin’ happen, Alan?”
He shook his head, found himself fighting down a sob, and then told it all, or as much as he could tell and still face them. He wept as he spoke. Miss Lewis said, “Oh, Alan,” and came to hold him. His voice broke into hitching breaths, and, her arms still around him, Miss Lewis said fiercely, “I don’t care about that filthy picture anymore. But this is too much. He’s a child!”
Mr. Tate said, “Ma’am, I doubt that the thing, whatever it is, devil or man, cares whether Alan’s a man or a boy. There’s just plain evil here, and evil is no respecter of persons.”
Alan finally controlled his breathing. “There’s more to it,” he said. “I think maybe the beginning of it.”
“The beginning?”
Miss Lewis, without fuss, offered him a handkerchief, and he wiped his eyes and nose. “Yes’m, I think it might be. Do you know if there used to be a livery stable where the theater is now?” he asked.
Tate didn’t know. Miss Lewis had heard something about it. Slowly, Alan related the vision he had suffered, the black man hanged, burned, rolling free of the fire at last to lie facedown in mud and water. “I believe that has something to do with it,” Alan said. “But I don’t know anything about it.”
Ann Lewis tugged at a lock of her hair. “The stable did burn down. I know that much. I can check the rest.”
“I’ll find out about it, too,” Tate said. “I can ask some of the older fellows on the Square.” His gaze, direct and glittering, turned full on Alan. “Do you think this is a hauntin’? This colored man’s spirit comin’ back?”
Alan could only shake his head. He didn’t know; and something, he could not say what, kept him from talking about Mr. Badon. “I don’t know. I don’t think there are ghosts, but — I don’t know.”
But the other two would try to find out. His main worry was, at first, Diane — and she clearly did not want him to think about her at all, never mind worrying about her.
On Monday, having thought about Miss Lewis’s books and about what he had gleaned from his own, Alan found something to occupy him. His uncle Frank was away again, and his aunt Betty agreed to something her husband would surely have forbidden: she gave Alan permission to use Frank’s tools and workshop. Alan had given her the impression that he wanted to make something for his father, as, under Uncle Frank’s supervision, he had earlier made for him a tie rack and a bookshelf. Aunt Betty had no idea what Alan was really up to.
He was making weapons.
His father had a never-used set of sterling silverware, real silver. Alan abstracted three dinner knives from the set.
After all, according to the stories in his books, vampires, warlocks, or werewolves could be quelled with silver.
In the workshop Alan honed the dull dinner-knife blades to thin stilettos, then used the drill press to drill holes in their handles. He bolted heavier new wooden handles on. It took him three evenings, but when he had finished and had restored the workshop to its original order with his customary neatness, Alan felt a lot easier. He concealed the knives in one of his bureau drawers, thinking that maybe his lie to his aunt wasn’t that bad: that maybe in a way he had actually made something for his father.
September passed away in a haze of concern and fear. During the last few days of the month, Alan had to worry about his father, who had come down with fever, nausea, and aches. Dr. Smith congratulated him on the first authentic case of Asian flu in Gaither and put him to bed for a week. John Kirby was not the best of patients. Alan and his aunt Betty saw him through the last weekend in September, and then Alan had to go to school and leave him home alone. Fortunately, Alan’s aunt was made for just such an emergency; Betty Lessup checked on him five or six times a day, while his temporary helper Julie Finchley happily kept the shop.
Despite John’s insistence that he was really well, that nothing much was the matter with him to begin with, he was so weak that he kept pretty much to his bed, except for times when he would lie miserably on the sofa and watch television. So he welcomed in October, wheezing and groaning.
It was a wet welcome. Rain set in on Sunday, and by the first day of the month, Tuesday, an inch and a quarter had already fallen. That increased over the next couple of days, until by Thursday, the third, Gaither had received three and a third inches of rain, over three-fourths of October’s normal total rainfall. The drumming of it on the roof became incessant, and by Tuesday Rainey Hill lived up to its name: the street became first a rivulet and then a torrent, so that Alan had to walk his bicycle up the hill across lawns rather than fight the current.
At least by Wednesday his father was perking up a bit, enough at least to follow on the radio the first game of the World Series. As a matter of general principle and from the deep-seated desire to root for the underdog, John and Alan Kirby were anti-Yankee fans, and they pulled for the Milwaukee Braves. The Braves went down to defeat by a score of three to one in that first game, which just proved, John Kirby groused, that the Braves needed well people to cheer them on, not invalids.
Alan studied the papers, read them aloud to his father. He paid unusually close attention to the local obituary pages, but the columns seemed normal: seven deaths in the county that first week of October, one accidental (an electrocution) and six of natural causes, the Advocate’s usual “short illness” (his father told him to read “stroke or heart attack”) or “long illness” (cancer). There were no murders. True, the newspaper noted that Sheriff Quarles’s wife was extending her visit to her family (her sister was ailing: the Asian flu had hit Blairsville, too) for another few days, but that seemed innocent enough.
Miss Lewis saw Alan at school on Thursday and suggested something new, something that had just occurred to her: a trip to Athens. “I can use the university library,” she explained. “If whatever is happening is real and not just our imaginations, there have to be ways of dealing with it. None of the textbooks mention any kind of defenses against these — these things, but surely there’ll be something in the library folklore section.”
Alan was interested, but he was already feeling a little draggy himself. He went to school on Friday, sat listless in his seat, and suddenly felt Miss Ulrich’s palm dry and cool on his forehead. “You’re burning up!” she said. “I think you’d better see Miss Black right away, young man.”
Miss Irma Black was the school nurse. She popped an alcohol-flavored thermometer in his mouth, left it there for what seemed to be an hour or so, and then announced that he had a temperature of a hundred and two. She asked if it would be all right to call his father, and he told her to call his aunt instead.
Back in the classroom, Alan explained that he would be leaving. He asked Jack Harwell to bring his bike home (Jack lived on Rainey Circle, not far from his house), and Jack responded with an impression of someone else’s impression of the obstreperous Irishman from radio’s “Allen’s Alley”: “Yes, me boy, you’re not long for this worrruld.” Miss Ulrich shook Jack.
Alan was in a floating, dreamy state by the time Betty Lessup arrived. He sat in the front seat of her Packard listen
ing to the monotonous whine and pump of the windshield wipers, which sped up as she accelerated, slowed when she stopped for a light or a stop sign. She got him to the clinic, and Dr. Smith immediately diagnosed Asian flu. “You’re going to be the lucky one,” Dr. Smith, fitting a needle to a hypo, told him with indifferent cheer. “Here you’re getting it over with early. In a few weeks they’ll be dropping like flies all over town. When the school has to be closed, you’ll be out playing while everyone else is praying to get well or die. Drop your pants for me, Alan.”
Betty Lessup took him home, tucked him into bed — he rolled onto his right hip, since the shot still twinged in his left buttock — and his father came in a few minutes later. John Kirby was up and around now, though still weak and achy. He sat on the foot of the bed. “Sorry, Alan,” he said.
“Not your fault, Daddy.”
“Well, I gave it to you. Tell you what, I’ll stay home with you for the next few days. We haven’t done much together lately. We’ll listen to the Bulldogs tomorrow, play some Hearts, talk a little. That sound all right?”
“Who’s gonna cook?”
“Guess I’m up to it now.”
“Good.”
“You mean as opposed to your aunt’s cooking?”
“Mm-hmm.”
His father chuckled. “She means well.”
“I’m sleepy.”
The springs creaked. “All right, son. I’ll look in on you from time to time.”
He fell asleep and for an hour dreamed unformed nightmares, and when he woke up, he ached from shoulder to knee. His father followed Dr. Smith’s instructions: lots of liquids, aspirin, a prescription of vile-tasting liquid at four-hour intervals; and Alan, after a light evening meal of chicken, peas, and rice, threw up.
More from a sense of duty than a real desire to listen to the game, he asked his father to bring the radio in the next day. John checked his son’s temperature — it was now half a degree higher — and went back for the radio. Georgia was playing Michigan, and his father turned on the set, let it warm up, and tuned it.
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